


Invitation for One

by DesertVixen



Category: Room for One More (Urban Legend)
Genre: Creepy, Gen, Modern Retell, urban legend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 05:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14663958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/pseuds/DesertVixen
Summary: Lila keeps seeing the man with the dark dead eyes





	Invitation for One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outruntheavalanche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/gifts).



Lila saw the man everywhere, it seemed. There was no escape from the tall man with the dark, dead eyes, and the gravelly voice. He always wore black – sometimes a cloak, sometimes a long overcoat, sometimes perfectly correct evening dress. And he always said the same thing.

“Room for one more.”

*** 

She had glimpsed him first as a girl of twelve, sitting vigil with her sick grandmother – the same grandmother she had been named for. Boredom had led her to wander the room, examining pictures and knickknacks that she had seen a hundred times. Finally, she had drifted to the window, looking out over the garden her grandmother had designed and nurtured. 

At first, Lila thought it was a trick of the moonlight. It was a man, a tall man who wore a dark cloak, and he walked through the garden as if he did not care that he was trespassing. She stood frozen at the window, until he looked up at her from below the window.

“Room for one more.” His voice was low and quiet, yet she heard him perfectly.

Suddenly, there was a gasp from her grandmother’s bed, and Lila hurried to her side, hurried to ring the bell that would summon the servants and her parents. She took her grandmother’s hand in hers, feeling it cold and frail in her own. 

Her grandmother died before the next dawn, peacefully in her own bed. Lila was so caught up in the event that she almost forgot about the man, until the next evening when she was alone in her room.

The man had come from the west. The only thing west of their house was the family graveyard.

She tried to convince herself that perhaps she had dreamed it, but she knew she had not.

*** 

The next time she saw him, she was fifteen, visiting her father and uncle on board the ocean liner they planned to sail for America on. Her father had been trying to convince her that she should join them on the trip instead of travelling back to school. They had all laughed about it, although part of her did wish she could go.

Until she was in the hallway and saw the man with the dark dead eyes. “Room for one more,” he said, looking directly at her. He began to reach for her, but Lila backed away, then turned and ran. When she looked behind her, he was gone, but Lila wasted no time in leaving the ship. The man gave her a horrible feeling.

She had been back at school for two days when she received a telegram from her mother, telling her that the ship her father and uncle had sailed on had struck an iceberg and sunk. Her father and uncle were not among the survivors.

*** 

The next time she saw him, Lila was nineteen. She had just left her mother in a first-class compartment on the train and was waiting to get off the train when she looked up suddenly and saw him. He stood just beyond the exit in front of an open compartment, dressed in a black overcoat. His hand was extended as if to take a ticket.

“Room for one more.”

Lila shrank back, stepping on the foot of the person behind her. She could hear their sharp complaint, but all she could think about was getting away from the man with the horrible dark dead eyes. She darted back along the aisle, to the exit at the other end. Thankfully, the man was not somehow there as well, and she stepped down on to the platform. 

The train began to pull away, and Lila’s mother opened her window, leaned out to wave at her daughter. Lila waved for a moment, then froze in horror. Past her mother’s shoulder, she could see the door of her compartment was open. The man with the dark dead eyes was there, directly behind her mother. 

“Mother! Mother!” 

“I love you!” Her mother called it out gaily, as if she was surprised to find her daughter suddenly so emotional. “I’ll see you after my trip.”

Lila turned and ran to the station office, desperate to find someone who could stop the train. 

Ten minutes later, they heard the crash. Another train had been on a wrong track, had struck her mother’s train. There were no survivors in the car her mother had been on.

*** 

Her fiancé smiled down at her. “I’ll be home soon enough, but I wish you would come to the airport and see me off. I’m going to have to miss you for even longer.”

It sounded silly, even to her own ears, but Lila simply could not. She was too afraid that she would see the man again. Her mother had been dead for two years, but the memory of the man standing behind her mother was still too vivid. 

He lifted his bag. “At least walk with me down to the street?”

She took his free hand. Perhaps if she just went down to the street everything would be all right. Lila laughed at something he said as they walked down the stairs, enjoying the warmth of his hand around hers.

On the street, he hailed a cab, and turned to give Lila a last kiss. The cab stopped, and her fiancé stepped towards it and opened the door.

It wasn’t until he was already seated in the cab, and she was leaning down to blow him a kiss that she saw the driver.

The driver with the dark dead eyes.

She froze, horrified, as he spoke. “Room for one more.”

“Oh, she’s not going,” her fiancé told the driver. “Good-bye, Lila. I love you.”

“No!” She thought she screamed it, but it came out in a strangled whisper. “No, please, no.”

But the cab had pulled away. Lila stood there, helplessly watching the cab as it moved along in traffic, as it carried him away from her.

As another vehicle ran though a red light and plowed into the side of the cab.

Then, and only then, could Lila move. She ran towards the scene of the accident, towards her fiancé. 

He had died on impact, the medic told her.

But the driver had disappeared.

*** 

Lila left the lawyer’s office, still a little stunned at the amount of money her fiancé had left her. At her lawyer’s advice, she had updated her will – with the deaths that seemed to follow her around, she had become a very wealthy young woman. In the event that something happened to her, Lila wanted the money to go towards worthy causes – the sort of worthy causes her parents had supported, that her fiancé had been concerned about. 

The idea of spending it brought her no pleasure at all.

The elevator was taking a long time, so long that she almost considered taking the stairs. There was really no rush – it wasn’t as if there was anyone left to wait for her – but the prospect of climbing down five flights of stairs in her heels was not a pleasant one. So she waited.

When the elevator doors opened, there were several people already on it. One of them was a man with dark dead eyes, wearing a black suit.

“Room for one more.” His voice was gravelly, the voice she had heard so many other times.

Lila stepped on the elevator. It was time to stop running, now that she had lost everyone she cared about. She just hoped the others got off the elevator first.

“Thank you,” she said quietly to the man as the elevator doors closed.

A minute later, there was a horrible crash. When the first responders were able to cut into the wreckage of the elevator car, they saw it was too late for the young woman who had been on the elevator.  


“At least more people weren’t killed,” one of them told the ambulance driver.

“Yes,” said the man with dark eyes. “We only have room for one more.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you like it! I love this story, so I was excited to have it for a pinch hit. The retell is meant to be somewhat modern, but not set in a particular time period.
> 
> It's also a little inspired by the Twilight Zone episode The Hitch-Hiker, where the woman keeps seeing the man who represents Death.


End file.
